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Stories are what happen when characters meet challenges. To me, both are interesting: the characters, and the challenges.

Stories are everywhere, and the best ones are surprising. So I promise to be unpredictable. Category: untrammeled exploration.

Right now is a particularly momentous time in my life, as my wife and I embark on our own personal Road Revolution… closing down a hobby farm and Ohio business, and moving to Seattle to relearn, retool, re-invent. So along with the stories from the world of marketing, business, academia, economics, ecology, and movies that have always intrigued me, I’ll also have a lot of personal stories to tell as I reinvent everything. What won’t change is my abiding curiosity about people, their stories, the storytelling media, and the ideal of authenticity.

One of the advantages I’ve enjoyed professionally over the years has been my immersion in the contemporary youth culture through admissions marketing efforts. I hope to share my perspectives on how to communicate with authenticity to this critically important market niche: the newest cool cohort, who now define cool for all of us.

To consistently reach people of any age with a message — what, so what, and why — is like making lightning strike twice. Way harder than bottling lightning bugs. Hopefully the process of writing a reflective blog will serve to help me sharpen my reflections on what works and what doesn’t. So if you’re into recruiting, or fundraising, or marketing or branding for any serious enterprise — college, non-profit, NGO, or B2B communication, I think you’ll find some useful ideas on these pages.

Social media are reinventing the storytelling tools that have worked since men started writing on cave walls. I want to join the resulting dialog — whether via internet or twitter or whatever else comes next. Not because I care about the technologies involved, but because I care about ideas and the people who express them. And the kinds of ideas I care most about fall under the categories of ecology, economics, communication — the human condition, and the planet we live on.

I call my writing/marketing/filmmaking company Ztoryteller, LLC, (pronounced, Storyteller) and you can find it at www.ztoryteller.com.